CAISTER Keyboard Festival Report October 2004
This is a twice yearly event April & October Caister (East Coast UK). And once a year in May at Blackpool on the West Coast UK. These Festivals run for 7 nights with accommodation Bed & Breakfast & Evening meal.Professional players from around the world, USA. Japan. Australia. Holland. Germany & UK take part in the evening concerts plus late night jam sessions till the early hours. During each day manufacturers’ are on hand to provide keyboard tutorials and retailers have a number of used keyboards & Organs for sale. Free music instruction takes place during the mornings. The food is good with plenty of choice and a beach is nearby if you need to walk your breakfast off or a nice warm indoor swimming pool.

The following products were on show. BOHM. CASIO. GEM. HAMMOND. KETRON. KORG. LOWREY. ORLA. ROLAND. THOMAS. WERSI & YAMAHA.
Basically I am only mentioning New Products and there were no major surprises.

BOHM Came over from Germany as they do not have a UK Distributor. Two new models shown £30,000 & £36,000. A little beyond most of our pockets and you also need a mighty large room to put them in.

KORG New PA50 model added to the PA80 range and is remarkable value. The sound engine and styles appear to be from the PA80. No after touch but at £699 it’s a winner. PAX1 61 keys with speakers was sounding very nice and I had to check that the excellent sound was in fact being produced solely from it’s built in speaker system. PAX will have a new OS v2.0 available within the next few weeks (November) this will add a number of new and improved features. KORG UK have now increased their customer support staff which will enable PA Arranger owners to phone for product advice.

KETRON Were showing a prototype two manual organ named Konzept using the XD3 module. This was purely to see what interest it created.

HAMMOND New XK-3 Drawbar Keyboard. This is a single keyboard version the famous B3. 73 keys (61 + 12 presets) This board with good external amplification just sounds like the large B3. The internal preamp includes 2 valves for that authentic Hammond sound.

ROLAND. The New flagship model Roland G70 was not shown, it is ready for production and all that is required is installation of style software depending on the country of sale. I have to give some respect here as Roland could have easily have had a sample and would have benefited from a number of sales, but instead they decided to hold back until the product was finalized. Price was not certain but should be approx £2500. The G70 will be shown at Music Live NEC UK in November. The EXR3. EXR5 & EXR7 with 76 keys. All 3 models give excellent value for money value.

WERSI Also came over from Germany just like Bohm no UK Distributor at the present time. Wersi performed a number of mini morning and afternoon concerts from Brett Wales (UK) and Mark Whale (Germany).

YAMAHA. This time the new CVP’s 3XX & PSR3000 were given most of the tutorial time but the Tyros was not left out. As usual Yamaha in- depth Tutorials were of a high standard and provide a great help to new customers. CVP 309 & 307 piano lid contains all the controls (as per KN7000), opening and closing of this lid contains a damper action, all very neat.

We had a great time and the weather gave us sun every day with only a little rain during the night.
Overall the evening concerts were of a very high caliber. The outstanding artists for me where Mark Whale (Wersi). Robert Barta (Bohm). Mark whale played River dance (No sequencing) percussion feet & left hand, melody right hand. This performance was remarkable and received a standing ovation

A final note. I discussed key bed sensor strip replacement with Roland. They stated they have never had to replace a strip due to wear, any replacements needed were because of dust & grime. The moral here is always keep your keyboard covered when not being played, even in those Smokey rooms when taking a gig break.

Graham UK.

Great review as always, Graham!


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Roy-Andrè

As usual, it sounds as if you had lots of fun. My only regret is that we don't have something of that caliber here is the U.S..

Cheers,

Gary